by Taylor Brown
“Just don’t tell Eustace you like it.”
“I’m not as dumb as you.”
The roadhouse was a two-story clapboard built on the very edge of a ravine. There was a shared porch running the length of the second floor. A couple of girls, underdressed for the cold, leaned on the railing, smoking cigarettes. Out back a cedar deck hung far out over the edge of the abyss on a skeleton of thin stilts that looked ever-so-slightly out of plumb. More than one man had been thrown or pushed or kicked over the side during a brawl, his body broken on the rocky crags far below. Still more drunks had managed to fall over the waist-high railing while relieving themselves, enthralled perhaps by the sight of their golden banners streaming out into the void. There were notices plastered all over the place warning against the practice, mostly ignored, and hammered to one of the porch supports a hand-painted sign: THIS AIN’T HELL.
People called the place Hell for short.
The screen door slammed behind them and they sat at the counter and ordered cheeseburgers and spuds and beers. It was Falstaff in white cans, taken from an icebox below the bar. The bartender punched them open with a church key and set them pooling on the bar. Eli took his up and turned to survey the place, his elbows resting on the back of his high chair. There was a small square-dance floor with nobody on it. A few people smoking in the surrounding booths, their eyes half shut, and an old man trying to work a coin into the nickelodeon, his hand shaking.
Rory sipped his beer.
“Granny blowed a hole in the roof last night.”
“Say what?”
“Said she heard a panther up there.”
“Good hell,” said Eli. “You think she was hearing things?”
“That woman, I don’t know. She don’t spook easy. I’m figuring something must of been up there. Panther, I doubt it.”
Eli squinted one eye and crossed his arms.
“What time was this?”
“Along about dawn or a little before.”
Eli nodded, thumbing his beard.
“I was up early this morning, finishing a head-job on that ’51 Merc? Heard a built motor out on the road. Thought it was you coming home till I realized it was going down the mountain and not up.”
“Could of been one of Eustace’s other boys.”
“Sure, but it wasn’t a V8. It was a straight-six.”
“You sure?”
Eli’s beer froze halfway to his mouth.
“You think I can’t tell the difference?”
“I wasn’t saying that.”
“Sure you weren’t.” Eli took a long pull from his beer, belching through his teeth. “You know those Muldoon boys favor the Hudson, that high-compression six.”
“Could you tell if you heard it again?”
“Can a pig eat shit? I know where to find them, too.”
“Where?”
Eli grinned.
“Gumtree Speedway, Friday night.”
* * *
Rory cursed himself. It had begun to rain, a staccato clapping on the body of the car, marbly and hard. He hadn’t yet patched the cabin roof. He could imagine the rain streaming down in narrow-gauge shafts, tinkling into an old spittoon or chamber pot. Granny just watching, sucking her teeth. He’d already dropped Eli back at the garage.
“Tell Granny May not to shoot me next time I come to visit,” Eli had said.
“Just stay off the roof.”
“That, I intend to.”
Rory drove slowly now, in low gear, climbing the mountain toward home. The edges of the road were swelling, a pair of small rivers tumbling down the mountain. Beyond that the world was slanted and white-blown with rain. The tires spun on the rocks, in the mud, and he squinted for washouts and mudslides and wind-felled trees along his path. He wondered if it was storming down in the valleys, in the foothills and mill towns. In the place where she—Christine—lived. He wondered if it was raining over in Raleigh, on the roof of the ward where they housed his mother. He wondered what it sounded like, there inside her room.
When he got home there was an iron stew pot below the leak, half full, and the door to Granny’s room was closed. No light flickered at the threshold. He dumped out the pot and set it back in place, then fed the stove. He went to his room and pulled off his boot and sock and his wooden leg, which he stood on the floor beside the bed. He peeled off his sodden clothes and hung them to dry and lay on the bed a long few minutes before he realized he was shivering with cold. He got up to warm himself by the stove but realized he’d have to hop, waking Granny, or else crawl along the floor. He lay back down and curled himself in the covers, still shivering, hoping not to dream.
The paintings watched him from the wall, hanging upon their silent flames of wing.
CHAPTER 13
Gumtree Speedway roared on the edge of town, a red crater in the earth, smoking and quaking with the mania of throttled engines. Gum lumber grandstands stood along the front straight, shivering before the onslaught, the terraced benches filled with spectators huddled in scarves and woolen hats. Stadium lights shone in white-eyed barrage, their black wires bellying pole to pole. The racers wheeled beneath the lights, a tornado of gutted-out coupes with giant motors, each knifing sideways through the red clay of the track. They were machines salvaged from wrecking yards and cobwebbed garages, reborn at the hands of speed-crazed farmboys and mill-hands.
Rory and Eli parked on the hill above the track. The spectators’ cars were parked in formation, long ranks of them close-huddled like an armored division, ticking as they cooled. Among them a number of V8 Fords, squatty coupes or sedans sitting high-tailed on bootlegging springs. Cars that could be heard on the hill-roads night after night, paying for themselves.
They walked down the hill toward the gate. Rory had patched the roof earlier that week, kneeling on the cedar shakes with nails stuck from his mouth like awkward fangs while Granny, unseen in her rocker on the porch, assaulted him with gossip. He wasn’t sure where she got so much of it. It was like she pulled the rumors straight out of the air, like a radio would. He figured people must come by when he wasn’t there. She said one of Milly McMann’s goats had been taken by a neighbor-dog. She said poor Linney Wallace’s son had come home from the knitting mill with a case of the white-lung. She said there was this crazy little church that had sprung up down there in town, in a filling station. She said it was full of crazies, the kind that ought to be avoided—same’s that Cooley boy with the snakes in his head. Try as he might to shut her out, Rory’s hammer kept ringing down as if in punctuation to what she told.
They bought their tickets from a fat lady sitting behind a folding card table, a dollar for the two of them. Rory paid. They handed their tickets to a skinny man working the gate—the fat lady’s husband—and walked down in front of the stands to look for seats. They didn’t know the faces in the crowd. These were mill-hands, mainly, people who’d come down out of the mountains for “public work.” Wages. A thing almost unheard of in the hills. Now they worked in the mills six days a week. They were sweepers or loopers or oilers. Some worked in the card room, preparing the cotton. They were pale and soft-looking, with sickly creases underneath their eyes, like they lived underground. To hear it told, they subsisted on Double-Cola and Goody’s Headache Powder from the dope-wagons, wheeled pushcarts that circulated the mill, peddling sugary cakes and sodas and tonics. Tonight they had other remedies: jars of white whiskey secreted between their knees, their faces jolly-red in the autumn dark.
Rory and Eli found seats in the top row, up among the snickering teens and early drunks, and they excused themselves past people already seated, Rory trying not to smash anyone’s foot. As soon as they sat, Eli drew his big glass flask from the throat of his boot and pulled the stopper with his teeth, the clear liquid beading under the light. Rory swallowed open-jawed, exhaling through his teeth.
“That’s whiskey.”
The cars were lining up for the feature race, twenty of them staggered in motley pairs. They squ
atted on meaty rubber, their bodies humped and raked, their grilles glaring in the spotlights. Some of them had fancy, two-tone paint schemes, with the names of filling stations or wrecking yards or hardware stores painted on the doors. Most of them didn’t. Most of them had mismatched fenders and hoods, their brightwork stripped for speed, their bodies ugly and cruel as junkyard dogs. At the front of the pack crouched one low-slung Hudson Hornet, dark green, that looked like a road-going car with a number taped on the door.
Cooley Muldoon.
The cars rumbled and smoked as they awaited the green flag, a herd of steel hulks twitching beneath the lights. Their hoods torqued ever so slightly as the drivers raced their engines. The sound of the motors tore through the night, snarling and snapping, each fighting to be loudest. Children slapped their hands over their ears, muffling the noise, their daddies watching stone-faced and open-eared as if they took a grim pleasure in going deaf. The race official, clad in a set of gleaming white coveralls, stood in the flag stand, a rickety platform that looked built by treehouse boys. He slashed the green flag through the air like a battle standard.
The night exploded, every motor wailing at once. A stampede of crazed metal, of hard bright edges slashing through smoke and dust, like sabers or lances, and then a car speared ahead of the storm, stretching for the first turn, and the others crowded quick upon its heels. The drivers hurled their cars sideways into the corner, their tails kicked out, skittering for traction on the bank. Some went high, some low, the drivers in their white helmets fighting the wheel, steering the skinny front tires counter to the turn, angling them this way and that, each car riding the edge of control. Their tails wagged with power, threatening to spin them back into oncoming traffic.
The cars strung out down the backstretch, two wide at full song, then bunched again in turns three and four, fenders clashing, paint scuffed away or banged newly in place. Then out again from the corner, throttled sideways for speed. Coming down the front straight, past the grandstands, they sounded like warplanes, the gull-winged Corsairs that strafed hillsides and ridgelines. The gum lumber trembled as they passed, as if in fear of being struck, the deadwood singing beneath the spectators’ clenched rumps.
Eli pointed out the cars as they boomed down the straight. Who built this one, who drove that one. Cars rumored to be running cheater heads and racing cams, oversize pistons and triple carburetors. High-performance parts mail-ordered from speed shops in Charlotte or Atlanta or Chattanooga, sprung from whiskey money. He banged Rory on the knee.
“This is what we should be doing.”
“We’re here, aren’t we?”
“I mean in it. Out there.”
Rory spat between his boots.
“Expensive.”
Eli huffed.
“Ain’t nothing worth doing that don’t cost you.”
A maroon coupe ran too high in turn one, too fast, and the car slid straight instead of turning, the canted wheels tearing across the clay like plow blades. The machine ran straight over the top of the track, tumbling out of sight, and the spectators leapt upright, hands thrown to mouths or hearts. There were trees down there. They waited for an explosion, a balloon of fire to rise from the pines beyond the track. The seconds stretched out until the driver surfaced at the top of the berm, waving his helmet. Everyone let out their breath at once. Relief, it sounded like, or disappointment. The gum lumber groaned when they sat.
Later a cream sedan tangled with the Hudson coming out of turn two. The Hudson bumped the machine in the quarter panel, hard, and the sedan tipped sideways, the rear wheels coming off the ground, the car rolling barrel-like across the track, pieces flying off in every direction. The car came to rest on its roof, undercarriage turned up to the sky. Two yellow flags came out, waved frantically by the white-coated man in the stand. The racers slowed, filing into a single line, snaking around the wrecked car.
Safety workers ran out onto the track, pulling the driver through the crushed window. The man looked limp, dead. The workers huddled all around him, kneeling and squatting, jumping back as he came awake. The rest of the crew was gathered up against the side of the car, trying to right it. The driver leapt up and joined them, the bunch of them heaving against the running boards, rocking the car until it rolled over, righting with a bounce. Neither door would open. The driver crawled back through the window and cranked the motor. A blue-black cough from the tailpipe. He drove the crumpled machine down off the track and into the pits.
“That’s why we aren’t out there,” said Rory.
“Shit,” said Eli. He took a big pull off the flask.
Cooley’s Hudson leapt ahead after the restart, outpacing the others into the first turn. It was one of the new step-down models, built low and sledlike, green as the money spent to keep it so handsome and quick.
“Got that Twin-H 308,” said Eli. “Jump out them corners like a scorched jackrabbit.”
Rory grunted.
The cars kept carving into the clay, rutting it dark with shadow and rubber. They dove screaming into the corners, angled high on their outer wheels, bumping and clanging the cars on either side. Machines careened off the track, slung like breakneck satellites from orbit, spewing dust and smoke and shrapnel as they rolled. Cooley, winning, turned any car that crossed him. On the second-to-last lap he ran a blue Ford into a light post. The transformer exploded, a burst of showered light, like the white bloom of a phosphorus bomb, and the track went sudden-dark. The cars raced on undaunted, a vortex of screaming shadows, their headlights ripping haloes in the night.
Rory and Eli sat in their seats afterward, sipping whiskey as the stands emptied out. The track was still dark, the infield crawling with headlights, double-set like the glowing eyes of creatures of the night. Bears, perhaps, or wolves or panther-cats.
“So what you think? Was it Cooley’s Hudson you heard the other night?”
Eli tugged on a grip of beard.
“Hard to say.”
Rory ground his teeth.
“I thought you were the damn expert. The motor-witch.”
Eli looked at him a long moment, like watching something behind a wall of glass. He shook his head, sipped from the flask.
“Lot of other racket out there.”
“What if you had to guess?”
“I wouldn’t want to guess about a thing like that.”
“Dammit,” said Rory, standing up. “Let’s go.”
Outside the gate they waited for a jet-black Lincoln Capri, long as a hearse, to slide rumbling past them. The fat lady was riding shotgun, a pile of cash stacked in her lap. On the dashboard in front of her rested a long-nosed revolver, nickeled to catch the moon. They were headed to the infield to pay the winnings.
Cars were all over the place, reversing or pulling forward from their parking spots. A long line of ruby lights snaked its way over the hilled fairground and into the trees. They disappeared east, toward town. The drivers would go out to End-of-the-Road, most of them, to keep the party going. Others down to the lake, to scream and swim naked in the too-cold water, clinging to the nearest warm body. Some would go on home to belch and grunt, to wrestle in bed and pound the walls until the whiskey put them out.
Rory stood in front of the coupe’s door to unlock it. Over the roof, he watched a group of boys come walking toward a rust-patched car a few rows away. They slapped and cursed and shadowboxed one another as they came, big grins on their faces. All but the boy in front, who was on crutches. He wore a big plaster cast on his leg, his foot sticking out the bottom, the flesh swollen and discolored around the toes. He had a buddy on either side of him, more serious than the others, flanking him like guards. Rory recognized them from the other night.
The boy looked up in Rory’s direction, then cut his eyes away, quick, like he hadn’t seen him. He looked at the ground.
Rory waited for something to well up in him. Sympathy, maybe. Or regret.
“What is it?” asked Eli.
Rory shook his head and unlock
ed the door.
“Nothing.”
III. SICKLE MOON, WANING
Connor hardly even touched his lunches, which seemed treasures to Bonni. He brought pimento cheese sandwiches on triangles of bread so white and neat they looked like cake. He brought wormless apples that cracked like falling trees in his mouth and corn muffins peppered with poppy seeds and whole shingles of store-bought peanut brittle.
Why won’t you let me see your drawings? he asked.
Bonni clutched her sketchbook tight, as if it might open on its own.
They’re dumb, she said.
They are not. Let me see.
Why was it so hard to show him her work? Why did it feel like cracking open some door in her chest, revealing her raw, beating heart?
She set the sketchbook on the floor, pushed it across to him. He was gentle, opening the book with the edge of his thumb. He began turning through the pages, slowly at first, then faster. They were animals, mainly, a compendium of those she loved. There were grasshoppers and finches, field mice and gamecocks and barnyard cats. Antlered stags and bandit-masked raccoons and barred owls on the wing. They seemed to trail echoes of their own feathers and in their wake, ghosts of movement, as if they were caught not in a single moment but several.
Connor looked up at her, bits of apple stuck on his tongue.
My God, these are beautiful.
She leaned across to him, kissed him on the mouth. She could taste the great good apple on his tongue.
CHAPTER 14
Granny trudged up a small branch that zagged down the eastern slope of the mountain, the current dashing white-knotted from rock to rock, hastened by the recent storm. It was Saturday, early, and it had rained again in the night. Her shotgun lay across her back, the hemp sling slashed between her breasts, and she had a denim pouch slung from the opposite shoulder. In this she carried the roots she gathered. In her hand was the grubbing tool handed down by her father, an ancient mattock with a three-foot hickory handle. It looked like a pickax in miniature, with a hoe blade and spike.
